One of the more memorable moments in my coverage of crime in the nation’s capital took place in 1993, when relatives, friends and politicians came to the playground of Weatherless Elementary School to bemoan the death of Launice Smith. A four-year-old, Launice was running on the school playground a few days earlier when a teenager showed up with a gun in his hand and revenge on his mind. He shot and killed his rival, Kervin Brown. But in the hail of bullets from his 9 mm pistol, he shot Launice in the head. She died four days later. Delores Smith, one of Launice’s aunts, spoke at the gathering. A former D.C. cop, she bemoaned the violence that had made the streets run with blood. She looked at then-Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and said: “I have to opportunity to ask you: heat up the electric chair. Bring it back. If you bring back capital punishment, it will cut down on some of this killing. It’s not right to say a life for a life. I know. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But some of these animals?” she asked. “You need to replug that electric chair over there at D.C. jail and start frying some of them and make it public.” Delores Smith raised her hand up, as if she could plug it in herself. “And then,” she said, “they’ll stop.” I was reminded of Launice Smith and her Aunt Delores when I read that attorneys for sniper John Allen Muhammad last week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt their client’s execution. Muhammad, you will recall, was the mastermind behind the shooting spree that left 10 people dead and terrified the Washington region for weeks in the fall of 2002. Barring intervention by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine or the Supreme Court, Muhammad is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday. The appeal to Kaine seems to have failed. Muhammad’s current lawyers said he was paranoid and delusional during his trial in Virginia Beach in 2003. He represented himself, against the appeals of his court-appointed lawyers, Peter Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro. His lawyers now argue that Greenspun and Shapiro failed to force Muhammad to let them represent him. Muhammad’s new lawyers say he suffers from mental illness because of brain damage caused partly by childhood beatings. What they do not argue is that Muhammad was impaired during the random shootings when he directed his young accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, to kill and maim innocents like Dean Meyers, gunned down at a gas station near Manassas. They don’t mention that Muhammad earned an Expert Rifleman’s Badge in the Army and served in the Gulf War. Or than he was smart enough to run a credit card fraud scam in 1999. This is a tough call, but I am with Delores Smith. There’s justice and there’s catharsis due the people who loved the 10 who died in Muhammad’s shooting spree.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at [email protected]
